requirements for an OFBiz IDE

[Anders Hessellund]

Hi,

I've been doing a little reading of previous posts in this forum in order
to determine the requirements for a specialized OFBiz IDE (similar to
NetWeaver for SAP). Since I am still new to this community, my
observations might be wrong. However, as I see it, there are three main
user groups in the OFBiz community: 1) framework developers, 2)
application developers, and 3) application "customizers". The last group
is probably the largest, because the typical use case of OFBiz seems to be
to download, customize and deploy the standard OFBiz distribution. The two
first groups seems to have a significant overlap since application
development provides feature requests for the framework development.

I would appreciate some feedback on concrete tool requirements for the
three groups:

1) framework developers
   - e.g., better profiling and performance measurements of base components
2) application developers
   - e.g., better editors for different artifacts, analysis tools to
ensure consistency among XML files (such as checking whether a
referenced entity in a minilang file actually exists), navigation
tools, generators for boilerplate code (similar to Neogia)
3) application "customizers"
   - e.g., visual editors for frontend customization, easy configuration,
simple mapping from user requirements to actual ofbiz components

Please contribute to this list, if you have any ideas.

-- Anders

[Torsten Schlabach-2]

Hi Anders,

 > I've been doing a little reading of previous posts in this forum in
 > order to determine the requirements for a specialized OFBiz IDE
 > (similar to NetWeaver for SAP).

Would you be looking at building one? Are you thinking of Eclipse as the
framework for that as well? (I understand SAP NetWeaver is based on
Eclipse, isn't it?)

 > However, as I see it, there are three main
 > user groups in the OFBiz community: 1) framework developers, 2)
 > application developers, and 3) application "customizers".

I would add a forth group here:

End-users of the application.

Believe it or not, but this is ultimately all about "normal" (= non-IT)
people who sit in front of OFBiz and get real work done that makes the
company that's USING (not developing, not consulting, not training) a
particular OFBiz installation some bucks. I think this aspect often
get's lost in discussions.

Now the interesting question would be: Would an IDE be used only by the
groups 1-3 or by group 4 as well?

My initial feeling was that probably some kind of IDE would be something
for "us, the IT people" and should not be of any interest to business
users. But after giving this some more thought, I am not sure I would
stick with that view.

I think that customizing work can be done by both IT people as well as
business users, depending on complexity. If you think of customizing the
layout of an invoice or a report for example, this is definitely
someting a user would want to do. But of course, there are aspects to
customizing that would be beyong the scope of a non-programmer.

Nevertheless, this triggers the question wether an IDE should be
something that lives on someone's PC (as Eclipse would) or if all the
nice new web technologies (AJAX and the like) are mature enough in the
meanwhile to provide customizing through a web interface.

Regards,
Torsten


Anders Hessellund schrieb:

> Hi,
>
> I've been doing a little reading of previous posts in this forum in order
> to determine the requirements for a specialized OFBiz IDE (similar to
> NetWeaver for SAP). Since I am still new to this community, my
> observations might be wrong. However, as I see it, there are three main
> user groups in the OFBiz community: 1) framework developers, 2)
> application developers, and 3) application "customizers". The last group
> is probably the largest, because the typical use case of OFBiz seems to be
> to download, customize and deploy the standard OFBiz distribution. The two
> first groups seems to have a significant overlap since application
> development provides feature requests for the framework development.
>
> I would appreciate some feedback on concrete tool requirements for the
> three groups:
>
> 1) framework developers
>    - e.g., better profiling and performance measurements of base components
> 2) application developers
>    - e.g., better editors for different artifacts, analysis tools to
> ensure consistency among XML files (such as checking whether a
> referenced entity in a minilang file actually exists), navigation
> tools, generators for boilerplate code (similar to Neogia)
> 3) application "customizers"
>    - e.g., visual editors for frontend customization, easy configuration,
> simple mapping from user requirements to actual ofbiz components
>
> Please contribute to this list, if you have any ideas.
>
> -- Anders

[Anders Hessellund]

Hi Christopher,

That is very interesting. Do you have any concrete examples of features
(possibly from the framework the you mention) that you would like to see
in an ofbiz ide?

-- Anders

> Anders,
>
> For me as an (newbie) application developer, I would love to see ofbiz
> have an application development environment like Rails and RadRails.
>
> Rails has a number of generators for boilerplate code (scaffolding), and
> RadRails (eclipse based IDE) integrates nicely with Rails providing
> additional benefits like code completion, API help, database tools,
> console for running rails code and server integration (see the
> screencasts on radrails.org).
>
> Cheers ...
>
>
>
>
> On Sat, 2006-12-23 at 21:18 -0500, Anders Hessellund wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I've been doing a little reading of previous posts in this forum in
>> order
>> to determine the requirements for a specialized OFBiz IDE (similar to
>> NetWeaver for SAP). Since I am still new to this community, my
>> observations might be wrong. However, as I see it, there are three main
>> user groups in the OFBiz community: 1) framework developers, 2)
>> application developers, and 3) application "customizers". The last group
>> is probably the largest, because the typical use case of OFBiz seems to
>> be
>> to download, customize and deploy the standard OFBiz distribution. The
>> two
>> first groups seems to have a significant overlap since application
>> development provides feature requests for the framework development.
>>
>> I would appreciate some feedback on concrete tool requirements for the
>> three groups:
>>
>> 1) framework developers
>>    - e.g., better profiling and performance measurements of base
>> components
>> 2) application developers
>>    - e.g., better editors for different artifacts, analysis tools to
>> ensure consistency among XML files (such as checking whether a
>> referenced entity in a minilang file actually exists), navigation
>> tools, generators for boilerplate code (similar to Neogia)
>> 3) application "customizers"
>>    - e.g., visual editors for frontend customization, easy
>> configuration,
>> simple mapping from user requirements to actual ofbiz components
>>
>> Please contribute to this list, if you have any ideas.
>>
>> -- Anders
>>
>>
>
>

[Anders Hessellund]

Hi Torsten,

> Would you be looking at building one? Are you thinking of Eclipse as the
> framework for that as well? (I understand SAP NetWeaver is based on
> Eclipse, isn't it?)

I am currently doing research on how to improve the development experience
for enterprise systems such as Navision, Axapta and SAP. OFBiz is
interesting in that respect since it is open source and supported by a
large and enthusiastic community. I was actually considering prototyping a
small eclipse plugin for OFBiz. In order to do that, though, I need some
realistic requirements from the OFBiz community. I am not sure that the
requirements that I bring from looking at the commercial counterparts are
relevant here.

> Now the interesting question would be: Would an IDE be used only by the
> groups 1-3 or by group 4 as well?

I agree that end-users should also be taken into account when discussing
tool support. Nevertheless, I believe that offering tool support for group
1-2 and especially group 3 is most interesting. In the commercial tools
that I have been looking at, the support for group 3 (often partners and
3rd party customizers) is extremely weak. It would really add value if one
could come up with relevant tool support for the customization process.
Hence my request for a list of requirements ;)

> Nevertheless, this triggers the question wether an IDE should be
> something that lives on someone's PC (as Eclipse would) or if all the
> nice new web technologies (AJAX and the like) are mature enough in the
> meanwhile to provide customizing through a web interface.

I am not sure I think this is very important. Whether tool support is
offered as a desktop app or in an AJAX-powered webapp, the business
requirements should still be the focal point.

-- Anders

> Hi Anders,
>
>  > I've been doing a little reading of previous posts in this forum in
>  > order to determine the requirements for a specialized OFBiz IDE
>  > (similar to NetWeaver for SAP).
>
> Would you be looking at building one? Are you thinking of Eclipse as the
> framework for that as well? (I understand SAP NetWeaver is based on
> Eclipse, isn't it?)
>
>  > However, as I see it, there are three main
>  > user groups in the OFBiz community: 1) framework developers, 2)
>  > application developers, and 3) application "customizers".
>
> I would add a forth group here:
>
> End-users of the application.
>
> Believe it or not, but this is ultimately all about "normal" (= non-IT)
> people who sit in front of OFBiz and get real work done that makes the
> company that's USING (not developing, not consulting, not training) a
> particular OFBiz installation some bucks. I think this aspect often
> get's lost in discussions.
>
> Now the interesting question would be: Would an IDE be used only by the
> groups 1-3 or by group 4 as well?
>
> My initial feeling was that probably some kind of IDE would be something
> for "us, the IT people" and should not be of any interest to business
> users. But after giving this some more thought, I am not sure I would
> stick with that view.
>
> I think that customizing work can be done by both IT people as well as
> business users, depending on complexity. If you think of customizing the
> layout of an invoice or a report for example, this is definitely
> someting a user would want to do. But of course, there are aspects to
> customizing that would be beyong the scope of a non-programmer.
>
> Nevertheless, this triggers the question wether an IDE should be
> something that lives on someone's PC (as Eclipse would) or if all the
> nice new web technologies (AJAX and the like) are mature enough in the
> meanwhile to provide customizing through a web interface.
>
> Regards,
> Torsten
>
>
> Anders Hessellund schrieb:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I've been doing a little reading of previous posts in this forum in
>> order
>> to determine the requirements for a specialized OFBiz IDE (similar to
>> NetWeaver for SAP). Since I am still new to this community, my
>> observations might be wrong. However, as I see it, there are three main
>> user groups in the OFBiz community: 1) framework developers, 2)
>> application developers, and 3) application "customizers". The last group
>> is probably the largest, because the typical use case of OFBiz seems to
>> be
>> to download, customize and deploy the standard OFBiz distribution. The
>> two
>> first groups seems to have a significant overlap since application
>> development provides feature requests for the framework development.
>>
>> I would appreciate some feedback on concrete tool requirements for the
>> three groups:
>>
>> 1) framework developers
>>    - e.g., better profiling and performance measurements of base
>> components
>> 2) application developers
>>    - e.g., better editors for different artifacts, analysis tools to
>> ensure consistency among XML files (such as checking whether a
>> referenced entity in a minilang file actually exists), navigation
>> tools, generators for boilerplate code (similar to Neogia)
>> 3) application "customizers"
>>    - e.g., visual editors for frontend customization, easy
>> configuration,
>> simple mapping from user requirements to actual ofbiz components
>>
>> Please contribute to this list, if you have any ideas.
>>
>> -- Anders
>

[David E Jones-2]

Such a tool could get pretty fancy, but the most useful thing I think  
we've discussed in the past is a fairly simple IDE plugin (for  
Ecipse, NetBeans, IDEA, etc) that could display some sort of graph of  
relates resources given a specific resource.

For example, you could right click on a screen name in a screens XML  
file and have it pop up a graph showing all related forms, services,  
entities, controller views & requests, etc.

To make things more fun these graphs could vary for different common  
patterns in sets of screens, services, even sets of entities.

To make things yet again more fun the tool could identify missing  
elements that would be expected, and link to a code template of some  
sort (perhaps using a convenient and well known templating language  
like FTL...), to generate service defs and implementations based on  
entity definitions, and screen and form definitions based on service  
defs, and so on...

-David


On Dec 27, 2006, at 10:10 AM, Anders Hessellund wrote:

> Hi Torsten,
>
>> Would you be looking at building one? Are you thinking of Eclipse  
>> as the
>> framework for that as well? (I understand SAP NetWeaver is based on
>> Eclipse, isn't it?)
>
> I am currently doing research on how to improve the development  
> experience
> for enterprise systems such as Navision, Axapta and SAP. OFBiz is
> interesting in that respect since it is open source and supported by a
> large and enthusiastic community. I was actually considering  
> prototyping a
> small eclipse plugin for OFBiz. In order to do that, though, I need  
> some
> realistic requirements from the OFBiz community. I am not sure that  
> the
> requirements that I bring from looking at the commercial  
> counterparts are
> relevant here.
>
>> Now the interesting question would be: Would an IDE be used only  
>> by the
>> groups 1-3 or by group 4 as well?
>
> I agree that end-users should also be taken into account when  
> discussing
> tool support. Nevertheless, I believe that offering tool support  
> for group
> 1-2 and especially group 3 is most interesting. In the commercial  
> tools
> that I have been looking at, the support for group 3 (often  
> partners and
> 3rd party customizers) is extremely weak. It would really add value  
> if one
> could come up with relevant tool support for the customization  
> process.
> Hence my request for a list of requirements ;)
>
>> Nevertheless, this triggers the question wether an IDE should be
>> something that lives on someone's PC (as Eclipse would) or if all the
>> nice new web technologies (AJAX and the like) are mature enough in  
>> the
>> meanwhile to provide customizing through a web interface.
>
> I am not sure I think this is very important. Whether tool support is
> offered as a desktop app or in an AJAX-powered webapp, the business
> requirements should still be the focal point.
>
> -- Anders
>
>
>> Hi Anders,
>>
>>> I've been doing a little reading of previous posts in this forum in
>>> order to determine the requirements for a specialized OFBiz IDE
>>> (similar to NetWeaver for SAP).
>>
>> Would you be looking at building one? Are you thinking of Eclipse  
>> as the
>> framework for that as well? (I understand SAP NetWeaver is based on
>> Eclipse, isn't it?)
>>
>>> However, as I see it, there are three main
>>> user groups in the OFBiz community: 1) framework developers, 2)
>>> application developers, and 3) application "customizers".
>>
>> I would add a forth group here:
>>
>> End-users of the application.
>>
>> Believe it or not, but this is ultimately all about "normal" (=  
>> non-IT)
>> people who sit in front of OFBiz and get real work done that makes  
>> the
>> company that's USING (not developing, not consulting, not training) a
>> particular OFBiz installation some bucks. I think this aspect often
>> get's lost in discussions.
>>
>> Now the interesting question would be: Would an IDE be used only  
>> by the
>> groups 1-3 or by group 4 as well?
>>
>> My initial feeling was that probably some kind of IDE would be  
>> something
>> for "us, the IT people" and should not be of any interest to business
>> users. But after giving this some more thought, I am not sure I would
>> stick with that view.
>>
>> I think that customizing work can be done by both IT people as  
>> well as
>> business users, depending on complexity. If you think of  
>> customizing the
>> layout of an invoice or a report for example, this is definitely
>> someting a user would want to do. But of course, there are aspects to
>> customizing that would be beyong the scope of a non-programmer.
>>
>> Nevertheless, this triggers the question wether an IDE should be
>> something that lives on someone's PC (as Eclipse would) or if all the
>> nice new web technologies (AJAX and the like) are mature enough in  
>> the
>> meanwhile to provide customizing through a web interface.
>>
>> Regards,
>> Torsten
>>
>>
>> Anders Hessellund schrieb:
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> I've been doing a little reading of previous posts in this forum in
>>> order
>>> to determine the requirements for a specialized OFBiz IDE  
>>> (similar to
>>> NetWeaver for SAP). Since I am still new to this community, my
>>> observations might be wrong. However, as I see it, there are  
>>> three main
>>> user groups in the OFBiz community: 1) framework developers, 2)
>>> application developers, and 3) application "customizers". The  
>>> last group
>>> is probably the largest, because the typical use case of OFBiz  
>>> seems to
>>> be
>>> to download, customize and deploy the standard OFBiz  
>>> distribution. The
>>> two
>>> first groups seems to have a significant overlap since application
>>> development provides feature requests for the framework development.
>>>
>>> I would appreciate some feedback on concrete tool requirements  
>>> for the
>>> three groups:
>>>
>>> 1) framework developers
>>>    - e.g., better profiling and performance measurements of base
>>> components
>>> 2) application developers
>>>    - e.g., better editors for different artifacts, analysis tools to
>>> ensure consistency among XML files (such as checking whether a
>>> referenced entity in a minilang file actually exists), navigation
>>> tools, generators for boilerplate code (similar to Neogia)
>>> 3) application "customizers"
>>>    - e.g., visual editors for frontend customization, easy
>>> configuration,
>>> simple mapping from user requirements to actual ofbiz components
>>>
>>> Please contribute to this list, if you have any ideas.
>>>
>>> -- Anders
>>
>
>